Writing about random topics

The most expensive string we have ever purchased

This past Sunday, we had to take our cat in to the vet. For you see, Sunday morning, I noticed that she threw up. I was eating breakfast and I heard her doing it, and I walked into the living room. I could see that she was re-swallowing a piece of string. I deduced that she must have eaten it earlier, it didn’t sit well, and therefore she was trying to throw it up (yet swallowing it back down completely defeats the purpose of that).

It’s not unusual for the cat to throw up, nor for her to swallow things and then throw it up later. That’s something she does, so we are pretty quick to try to snatch things from her that might cause her to do this.

I had to leave early that morning so I informed the wife and departed. Before I left, the cat threw up once more. While I was gone, she threw up another couple of times.

I returned home to pick up the wife and we left again, returning a couple of hours later after locking the cat in the bathroom to try to contain the potential mess. What can we do but wait for her to pass this thing naturally?

Well, we returned home a couple of hours later and opened the door. There was slobber/saliva/vomit all over the floor. Yuck! I estimated that in total she must have thrown up at least 10 times that day.

We decided to take her to the vet. When we left this morning, the cat was still walking around, jumping on things, generally happy. When we took her to the vet a few hours later, I could see her eyes were starting to glaze over.

We got to the vet where we took her in and they did an x-ray. The thread she ate didn’t show up on the x-ray, but her intestines did and they looked all bunched up. When a cat swallows a thread, if it’s too long it can bunch of the intestines and start to saw through them. They recommended that the cat get prepped for surgery.

Erk.

Well, do it.

We went home that night and cleaned up the rest of the mess. The cat went in for surgery and then we waited for an update.

I went in the next day to visit the cat. She was a little groggy. She hadn’t eaten much all day and was running a fever which is common for cats after surgery. Her eyes looked wet as if she had fallen in water, and so did her tail. She was up and around, but moving slow and lethargic.

They shaved a large part of her belly, plus parts of her paws. You can see above she was a little hazy, and the bandage where they inserted an IV.

The next day I came back and they retook her temperature. She was running a slight fever but it had come down. We were allowed to take her home, and she was happy to be there. She was still moving slow, but was much happier.

She continues to recover, and is getting her energy back. She had a lot of incisions in her intestines, the doctor informed me that they had to make five separate ones in order to get all the thread out.

And speaking of the thread, we have no idea what it was that the cat ate. The vet gave us the evidence afterward, and it appears to be a bunch of smaller threads woven together to make one large thread. It’s a big piece of thread, I estimate that unwound it is at least 1 1/2 to 2 feet in length.

What is that? I have no idea! We looked around the house searching for a candidate. Was it from clothing? Was it from the couch? Something else?

We don’t know.

But we’re happy to have the cat back, even if it did end up costing us $3500.